We were excited and sad at the same time; here we were making ourselves homeless, and jobless starting a new life. We made friends and family promise not to come and see us off at the airport because that would make it harder for us at such an emotional time. I guess we felt we must keep the stiff upper lip even when leaving the country.

The checkin at the airport with 8 big suitcases and 4 rather well stuffed hand luggage was a little exercise in repacking to get the weight of the suitcases even. They didn't charge us for being overweight. We climbed aboard our Air Canada flight tired (lack of sleep) and me trying to cheer the girls up. They were more effected by leaving than I was.

We had planned to go through immigration in Halifax when the flight landed at St John's in Newfoundland for an hour and we had to rush through it there. As we landed it started to snow ... Magical.

The immigration was fine and even though I had this big wad of cash with me the immigration office didnt bother to count he just said thats ok and after completing all the forms and receiving our little booklets we were here. Landed immigrants. It seemed pretty strange.

Next stop Halifax, where we now had a 4 hour lay over to wait for the flights to Fredericton. We managed to get on the earlier flight to Fredericton, where we had a huge GMC Envoy Van (17 MPG) waiting to help us carry all our luggage. The plane was a little thing seating about 20 people. I warned the girls not to go to the loo at the rear of the plane otherwise we would tip up :~) at least it raised a laugh.

It's now 7pm Atlantic time and 11pm GMT so we are getting tired and on arriving at Fredericton's little airport we found we only had hand luggage. Luckily for us Julie is always prepared and makes sure that we pack our hand luggage with some overnight stuff for just such occassions.

The guy at the luggage counter is very friendly and tells us it will be on a later flight. I cannot complain too much because I changed the flights and I expect they took one look at the luggage and thought "holy cow, it will never leave the ground with all that and people too". 

So we loaded our four now seemingly little carry on luggage into our HUGE Envoy van to drive the 15kms to our two bedroomed accommodation . The "Holyoake Motel and chalets" on route 102. Easy drive and shock awaited us. We discovered that on the internet the words "extremely clean" when used to describe   accommodation are relative. It totally depends on your personal definition of clean! Julie decided to clean the toilet and bathroom several times before letting us in to us it.